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Trendspotting: Vintage-Inspired Food Gifts & Experiences

The 19th century is back in style. This might seem like a reaction against the pressures of our wired timesexcept that items like heritage seeds and Victorian-inspired cheese knives are sold online and promoted via Twitter.

Restaurant Menus

At three soon-to-open restaurants, chefs are busy looking backward.

Courtesy of Virtue Feed & Grain

Virtue Feed & Grain, Alexandria, Virginia (photo)F&W Best New Chef 2006 Cathal Armstrong is transforming an old warehouse into a pub where he will serve Irish classics like kidney pie. A 19th-century ad for a feed business painted on an outside wall inspired the restaurant's name.

Next, Chicago
Star chef Grant Achatz and partner Nick Kokonas will open Next in early 2011 with a quirky concept: Achatz will debut a new menu every season based on a specific time and/or place (1912 Paris, for example). Instead of taking reservations, Next will sell tickets online.nextrestaurant.com.

House of Shields, San Francisco
Chef Dennis Leary will reopen the 102-year-old House of Shields in December 2010. For his menu of classic dishes like oyster pan roast, he looked to books on historical food, including The Best of Shaker Cooking.

Old-West Redux

Courtesy of Cosmopolitan Hotel & Restaurant

When renovating the Cosmopolitan Hotel and Restaurant in Old Town San Diego State Historic Park, owner Joseph Melluso worked with a historian to evoke 1869the year the onetime residence was transformed into a hotel. Now staffers in period dress preside over the saloon, complete with a bar from the 1850s, while chef Amy DiBiase explores ingredients that were common in 19th-century San Diego, like oysters, olives and cured fish.

Ice Cream Time Travel

I can read all I want about Marie Antoinette, the dining car on the Pennsylvania Railroad before World War II and Thomas Jefferson, but the closest I can ever get to time travel is through flavor and scent. When I sell my violet ice cream, for instance, I tell people how scented violets can be grown only in France, and how they were prized as a flavoring in desserts at the court of Versailles. When I put a flavor in that kind of context and share the stories, people slow down and enjoy their ice cream more. This year, I'm doing an assortment of ice creams called Foggy Mountain Collection. Many use forgotten ingredients native to Appalachia, like wild spicebush berries and elderberries. The idea is to conjure the Civil War era. (My great-great-great-great uncle was General Sherman!)